Pages

Wednesday, June 10, 2009

Looking Forward

Some of you are no doubt expecting me to respond to the slanderous lies that were carelessly strewn about Feet Meet Street yesterday but I’m not going to lend credence to them by dignifying them with an answer. I’m taking the high road which actually makes me more like Gandhi, plus look, I spelled his name correctly. Poor Nitmos forgot the first rule of mocking someone on the internet; make sure you don’t misspell anything, it makes you an easy target, and stupid. Almost nothing Nitmos said was actually true, except for the waterboarding pandas thing, I do so love to waterboard me some pandas. The other nice thing about pandas? No one is ever suspicious of the black eyes.

For now, I’m putting all that stupidity aside because I’ve got more pressing issues to deal with. In the wake of my horrendous Bolder Boulder experience, I’ve been pondering if it was just a bad day or if it was indicative of me getting slower. Naturally I like to think that I just had a bad day (cue Daniel Powter) but the only way to really find out for sure is to pose the question in the form of a race. Running another race is the only way to determine if I’m getting slower or if I was just having an off day. Initially, it was a question that I didn’t really want to ask but being a runner is all about putting yourself to the test. We do it every time we run which is every day for me, at least during the month of June. The next race on my calendar is the Georgetown to Idaho Springs Half Marathon and unless I get impatient and sign up for another race before then, I will have my answer on August 8th. Either that or I’ll be telling you all how it’s weird that I had two consecutive races that just happened to be bad days. In the meantime I’m ramping up the mileage and battening down the paces on my training runs because it’s also possible that I didn’t train appropriately for the Bolder Boulder. That will not be the case come August.

The other disturbing trend that has been consuming my thoughts is the fact that Candis is apparently at that stage of her running career where she is making exponential gains in speed while I continue to see diminishing returns at best. When she first started running we’d occasionally run together and I would have to run at a snail’s pace so that she could keep up. At the time I used to think to myself ‘wouldn’t it be cool if she got to be as fast as me so that we could do more training runs together.’ Surprisingly, I failed to see the unfathomable consequences of Candis being as fast as me; namely that she might actually beat me in a race someday. Now before you all get excited, I still beat her by 5 minutes in the Bolder Boulder and, as we’ve already established, I had a bad race. However, she’s certainly a lot closer to me than she was a year ago, when I soundly defeated her by more than 13 minutes. So now I’m thinking that maybe I don’t care as much about running together, I’d rather be faster than her and have to slow down when we run together. It’s more gentlemanly and less emasculating that way.